"Fun, at First."

Maple Story, the massive multi player online platformer RPG made by a Korean company known as Nexon. I'm going to give an honest opinion on this game.

Sound, 9/10: The music in sounds in this game is pretty nice I must admit. Cute little sound effects for the monsters and players, and nice music in the background that's kind of catchy. The music takes me back to the Super Nintendo for some reason, it's actually nice.

Graphics. 9/10: There nice, I must say, gorgeous background effects, and nice looking characters, you control little chubby sprites characters in a 2D platformer environment. But it looks nice and smooth looking. Nice on the eyes.

Game play, 4/10: Why people play this, I can't comprehend. Basically, you control these cute little chubby characters and walk around hitting monsters, perhaps the odd long range skill, that's basically it, I'm not going to sugar coat it, that pretty much says it, you can get skills and such that may slash or shoot in a unique way but, there's nothing special here. You can choose between a Warrior, Thief, Mage and Archer, and each of them branch into other jobs as the levels increase. You collect money and such to change the appearance of your character and equip them with new weapons, as you level you gain stats and skills to give to them. But, I find each character plays very similar when it comes down to it, its either, ranged, or not, there's no characters that have elemental defense or anything like that, its basically, long range or not. The max level is 200, but it takes really long to level once you reach around level 30, you'll find yourself fighting the same monsters over and over. And there is no real strategy to the enemies, especially if they lack any projectile attacks, you just simply hold in a button to attack them, and move back when they get too close. And that's it too, the enemies move back when there hit, so in most cases you can kill an enemy by simply holding a button. So yeah, in the long run, your finger will stay in the same place for hours at a time.

Replay Value, 2/10: I don't understand why people continue to play this on this one. I mean, there's no real reason to play, in the end, you pretty much do everything for nothing, there is no PVP, no fun competitive mini games, you basically just play until you quit. And since there is no max level (if there is nobody has reached it yet) you can never truly finish a character. It literally takes MONTHS to get to high levels; it takes about a full year to get to the 4th job advancement. But, even if you reach it, then what? You can't PVP to show off your skills, there are no competitive mini games; basically the only purpose to this game is to show off your characters appearance, skills, stats, and level. And when it comes down to it, each character is the same, there isn't enough skills to make anything unique, and most of the skills are too similar anyways. I guess the only reason people continue to play this is because they've made friends on it.That's basically all this game is in the long run, a glorified chat room.

Overall, 6/10: I used to play this, and I admit, at first, it was fun, or so I thought, I played it for about a year and a half. It seemed fun at first, but after I came to realization about what it was...I realized, how much time I had wasted.

I suppose you could give this game a try if you want, it's downloadable. But be warned, if your one of those people who can get addicted to something easy, you'll probably waste about 3 years on this game (possibly on one character), So yeah...Enjoy, I hope you found my review helpful, or course, my review is only an opinion, perhaps you may get hooked on the game, if you do....Happy Mapling (I'll pray for you).

Reviewer's Score: 6/10 | Originally Posted: 11/26/07

Game Release: MapleStory (US, 11/30/05)

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